Chapter XIV: Front Matter (14)

26. Item, the said abbot, in times past, hath had a great devotion
to ride to Llangarvan, in Wales, upon Lammas-day, to receive pardon
there; and on the even he would visit one Mary Hawle, an old
acquaintance of his, at the Welsh Poole, and on the morrow ride to
the foresaid Llangarvan, to be confessed and absolved, and the same
night return to company with the said Mary Hawle, at the Welsh Poole
aforesaid, and Kateryn, the said Mary Hawle her first daughter, whom
the said abbot long hath kept to concubine, and had children by her,
that he lately married at Ludlow. And [there be] others that have
been taken out of his chamber and put in the stocks within the said
abbey, and others that have complained upon him to the king's
council of the Marches of Wales; and the woman that dashed out his
teeth, that he would have had by violence, I will not name now, nor
other men's wives, lest it would offend your good lordship to read
or hear the same.

27. Item, the said abbot doth daily embezzle, sell, and convey the
goods and chattels, and jewels of the said monastery, having no need
so to do: for it is thought that he hath a thousand marks or two
thousand lying by him that he hath gotten by selling of orders, and
the jewels and plate of the monastery and corradyes; and it is to be
feared that he will alienate all the rest, unless your good lordship
speedily make redress and provision to let the same.

28. Item, the said abbot was accustomed yearly to preach at
Leynt-warden on the Festival of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary,
where and when the people were wont to offer to an image there, and
to the same the said abbot in his sermons would exhort them and
encourage them. But now the oblations be decayed, the abbot, espying
the image then to have a cote of silver plate and gilt, hath taken
away of his own authority the said image, and the plate turned to
his own use; and left his preaching there, saying it is no manner of
profit to any man, and the plate that was about the said image was
named to be worth forty pounds.

29. Item, the said abbot hath ever nourished enmity and discord
among his brethren; and hath not encouraged them to learn the laws
and the mystery of Christ. But he that least knew was most cherished
by him; and he hath been highly displeased and [hath] disdained when
his brothers would say that 'it is God's precept and doctrine that
ye ought to prefer before your ceremonies and vain constitutions.'
This saying was high disobedient, and should be grievously punished;
when that lying, obloquy, flattery, ignorance, derision, contumely,
discord, great swearing, drinking, hypocrisy, fraud, superstition,
deceit, conspiracy to wrong their neighbour, and other of that kind,
was had in special favour and regard. Laud and praise be to God that
hath sent us the true knowledge. Honour and long prosperity to our
sovereign lord and his noble council, that teaches to advance the
same. Amen.

By John Lee, your faithful bedeman, and canon of the said monastery
of Wigmore.

Postscript.--My good lord, there is in the said abbey a cross of
fine gold and precious stones, whereof one diamond was esteemed by
Doctor Booth, Bishop of Hereford, worth a hundred marks. In that
cross is enclosed a piece of wood, named to be of the cross that
Christ died upon, and to the same hath been offering. And when it
should be brought down to the church from the treasury, it was
brought down with lights, and like reverence as should have been
done to Christ himself. I fear lest the abbot upon Sunday next, when
he may enter the treasury, will take away the said cross and break
it, or turn it to his own use, with many other precious jewels that
be there.

All these articles afore written be true as to the substance and
true meaning of them, though peradventure for haste and lack of
counsel, some words be set amiss or out of their place. That I will
be ready to prove forasmuch as lies in me, when it shall like your
honourable lordship to direct your commission to men (or any man)
that will be indifferent and not corrupt to sit upon the same, at
the said abbey, where the witnesses and proofs be most ready and the
truth is best known, or at any other place where it shall be thought
most convenient by your high discretion and authority.

The statutes of Provisors, commonly called Præmunire statutes, which, forbade all purchases of bulls from Rome under penalty of outlawry, have been usually considered in the highest degree oppressive; and more particularly the public censure has fallen upon the last application of those statutes, when, on Wolsey's fall, the whole body of the clergy were laid under a præmunire, and only obtained pardon on payment of a serious fine. Let no one regret that he has learnt to be tolerant to Roman Catholics as the nineteenth century knows them. But it is a spurious charity which, to remedy a modern injustice, hastens to its opposite; and when philosophic historians indulge in loose invective against the statesmen of the Reformation, they show themselves unfit to be trusted with the custody of our national annals. The Acts of Parliament speak plainly of the enormous abuses which had grown up under these bulls. Yet even the emphatic language of the statutes scarcely prepares us to find an abbot able to purchase with jewels stolen from his own convent a faculty to confer holy orders, though he had never been consecrated bishop, and to make a thousand pounds by selling the exercise of his privileges. This is the most flagrant case which has fallen under the eyes of the present writer. Yet it is but a choice specimen out of many. He was taught to believe, like other modern students of history, that the papal dispensations for immorality, of which we read in Fox and other Protestant writers, were calumnies, but he has been forced against his will to perceive that the supposed calumnies were but the plain truth; he has found among the records--for one thing, a list of more than twenty clergy in one diocese who had obtained licences to keep concubines.[S] After some experience, he advises all persons who are anxious to understand the English Reformation to place implicit confidence in the Statute Book. Every fresh record which is brought to light is a fresh evidence in its favour. In the fluctuations of the conflict there were parliaments, as there were princes, of opposing sentiments; and measures were passed, amended, repealed, or censured, as Protestants and Catholics came alternately into power. But whatever were the differences of opinion, the facts on either side which are stated in an Act of Parliament may be uniformly trusted. Even in the attainders for treason and heresy we admire the truthfulness of the details of the indictments, although we deplore the prejudice which at times could make a crime of virtue.

We pass on to the next picture. Equal justice, or some attempt at it, was promised, and we shall perhaps part from the friends of the monasteries on better terms than they believe. At least, we shall add to our own history and to the Catholic martyrology a story of genuine interest.

We have many accounts of the abbeys at the time of their actual dissolution. The resistance or acquiescence of superiors, the dismissals of the brethren, the sale of the property, the destruction of relics, &c., are all described. We know how the windows were taken out, how the glass appropriated, how the 'melter' accompanied the visitors to run the lead upon the roofs, and the metal of the bells into portable forms. We see the pensioned regulars filing out reluctantly, or exulting in their deliverance, discharged from their vows, furnished each with his 'secular apparel,' and his purse of money, to begin the world as he might. These scenes have long been partially known, and they were rarely attended with anything remarkable. At the time of the suppression, the discipline of several years had broken down opposition, and prepared the way for the catastrophe. The end came at last, but as an issue which had been long foreseen.

We have sought in vain, however, for a glimpse into the interior of the houses at the first intimation of what was coming--more especially when the great blow was struck which severed England from obedience to Rome, and asserted the independence of the Anglican Church. Then, virtually, the fate of the monasteries was decided. As soon as the supremacy was vested in the Crown, enquiry into their condition could no longer be escaped or delayed; and then, through the length and breadth of the country, there must have been rare dismay. The account of the London Carthusians is indeed known to us, because they chose to die rather than yield submission where their consciences forbade them; and their isolated heroism has served to distinguish their memories. The pope, as head of the Universal Church, claimed the power of absolving subjects from their allegiance to their king. He deposed Henry. He called on foreign princes to enforce his sentence; and, on pain of excommunication, commanded the native English to rise in rebellion. The king, in self-defence, was compelled to require his subjects to disclaim all sympathy with these pretensions, and to recognise no higher authority, spiritual or secular, than himself within his own dominions. The regular clergy throughout the country were on the pope's side, secretly or openly. The Charterhouse monks, however, alone of all the order, had the courage to declare their convictions, and to suffer for them. Of the rest, we only perceive that they at last submitted; and since there was no uncertainty as to their real feelings, we have been disposed to judge them hardly as cowards. Yet we who have never been tried, should perhaps be cautious in our censures. It is possible to hold an opinion quite honestly, and yet to hesitate about dying for it. We consider ourselves, at the present day, persuaded honestly of many things; yet which of them should we refuse to relinquish if the scaffold were the alternative--or at least seem to relinquish, under silent protest?

And yet, in the details of the struggle at the Charterhouse, we see the forms of mental trial which must have repeated themselves among all bodies of the clergy wherever there was seriousness of conviction. If the majority of the monks were vicious and sensual, there was still a large minority labouring to be true to their vows; and when one entire convent was capable of sustained resistance, there must have been many where there was only just too little virtue for the emergency--where the conflict between interest and conscience was equally genuine, though it ended the other way. Scenes of bitter misery there must have been--of passionate emotion wrestling ineffectually with the iron resolution of the Government: and the faults of the Catholic party weigh so heavily against them in the course and progress of the Reformation, that we cannot willingly lose the few countervailing tints which soften the darkness of their conditions.

Nevertheless, for any authentic account of the abbeys at this crisis, we have hitherto been left to our imagination. A stern and busy administration had little leisure to preserve records of sentimental struggles which led to nothing. The Catholics did not care to keep alive the recollection of a conflict in which, even though with difficulty, the Church was defeated. A rare accident only could have brought down to us any fragment of a transaction which no one had an interest in remembering. That such an accident has really occurred, we may consider as unusually fortunate. The story in question concerns the abbey of Woburn, and is as follows:--

At Woburn, as in many other religious houses, there were representatives of both the factions which divided the country; perhaps we should say of three--the sincere Catholics, the Indifferentists, and the Protestants. These last, so long as Wolsey was in power, had been frightened into silence, and with difficulty had been able to save themselves from extreme penalties. No sooner, however, had Wolsey fallen, and the battle commenced with the papacy, than the tables turned, the persecuted became persecutors--or at least threw off their disguise--and were strengthened with the support of the large class who cared only to keep on the winning side. The mysteries of the faith came to be disputed at the public tables; the refectories rang with polemics; the sacred silence of the dormitories was broken for the first time by lawless speculation. The orthodox might have appealed to the Government: heresy was still forbidden by law, and, if detected, was still punished by the stake. But the orthodox among the regular clergy adhered to the pope as well as to the faith, and abhorred the sacrilege of the Parliament as deeply as the new opinions of the Reformers. Instead of calling in the help of the law, they muttered treason in secret; and the Reformers, confident in the necessities of the times, sent reports to London of their arguments and conversations. The authorities in the abbey were accused of disaffection; and a commission of enquiry was sent down towards the end of the spring of 1536, to investigate. The depositions taken on this occasion are still preserved; and with the help of them, we can leap over three centuries of time, and hear the last echoes of the old monastic life in Woburn Abbey dying away in discord.

Where party feeling was running so high, there were, of course, passionate arguments. The Act of Supremacy, the spread of Protestantism, the power of the Pope, the state of England--all were discussed; and the possibilities of the future, as each party painted it in the colours of his hopes. The brethren, we find, spoke their minds in plain language, sometimes condescending to a joke.

Brother Sherborne deposes that the sub-prior, 'on Candlemas-day last past (February 2, 1536), asked him whether he longed not to be at Rome where all his bulls were?' Brother Sherborne answered that 'his bulls had made so many calves, that he had burned them. Whereunto the sub-prior said he thought there were more calves now than there were then.'

Then there were long and furious quarrels about 'my Lord Privy Seal' (Cromwell)--who was to one party, the incarnation of Satan; to the other, the delivering angel.

Nor did matters mend when from the minister they passed to the master.

Dan John Croxton being in 'the shaving-house' one day with certain of the brethren having their tonsures looked to, and gossiping, as men do on such occasions, one 'Friar Lawrence did say that the king was dead.' Then said Croxton, 'Thanks be to God, his Grace is in good health, and I pray God so continue him;' and said further to the said Lawrence, 'I advise thee to leave thy babbling.' Croxton, it seems, had been among the suspected in earlier times. Lawrence said to him, 'Croxton, it maketh no matter what thou sayest, for thou art one of the new world;' whereupon hotter still the conversation proceeded. 'Thy babbling tongue,' Croxton said, 'will turn us all to displeasure at length.' 'Then,' quoth Lawrence, 'neither thou nor yet any of us all shall do well as long as we forsake our head of the Church, the Pope.' 'By the mass!' quoth Croxton, 'I would thy Pope Roger were in thy belly, or thou in his, for thou art a false perjured knave to thy prince.' Whereunto the said Lawrence answered, saying, 'By the mass, thou liest! I was never sworn to forsake the Pope to be our head, and never will be.' 'Then,' quoth Croxton, 'thou shalt be sworn spite of thine heart one day, or I will know why nay.'

These and similar wranglings may be taken as specimens of the daily conversation at Woburn, and we can perceive how an abbot with the best intentions would have found it difficult to keep the peace. There are instances of superiors in other houses throwing down their command in the midst of the crisis in flat despair, protesting that their subject brethren were no longer governable. Abbots who were inclined to the Reformation could not manage the Catholics; Catholic abbots could not manage the Protestants; indifferent abbots could not manage either the one or the other. It would have been well for the Abbot of Woburn--or well as far as this world is concerned--if he, like one of these, had acknowledged his incapacity, and had fled from his charge.

His name was Robert Hobbes. Of his age and family, history is silent. We know only that he held his place when the storm rose against the pope; that, like the rest of the clergy, he bent before the blast, taking the oath to the king, and submitting to the royal supremacy, but swearing under protest, as the phrase went, with the outward, and not with the inward man--in fact, perjuring himself. Though infirm, so far, however, he was too honest to be a successful counterfeit, and from the jealous eyes of the Neologians of the abbey he could not conceal his tendencies. We have significant evidence of the _espionage_ which was established over all suspected quarters, in the conversations and trifling details of conduct on the part of the abbot, which were reported to the Government.

In the summer of 1534, orders came that the pope's name should be rased out wherever it was mentioned in the Mass books. A malcontent, by name Robert Salford, deposed that 'he was singing mass before the abbot at St. Thomas's altar within the monastery, at which time he rased out with his knife the said name out of the canon.' The abbot told him to 'take a pen and strike or cross him out.' The saucy monk said those were not the orders. They were to rase him out. 'Well, well,' the abbot said, 'it will come again one day.' 'Come again, will it?' was the answer; 'if it do, then we will put him in again; but I trust I shall never see that day.' The mild abbot could remonstrate, but could not any more command; and the proofs of his malignant inclinations were remembered against him for the ear of Cromwell.

In the general injunctions, too, he was directed to preach against the pope, and to expose his usurpation; but he could not bring himself to obey. He shrank from the pulpit; he preached but twice after the visitation, and then on other subjects, while in the prayer before the sermon he refused, as we find, to use the prescribed form. He only said, 'You shall pray for the spirituality, the temporality, and the souls that be in the pains of purgatory; and did not name the king to be supreme head of the Church in neither of the said sermons, nor speak against the pretended authority of the Bishop of Rome.'

Again, when Paul the Third, shortly after his election, proposed to call a general council at Mantua, against which, by advice of Henry the Eighth, the Germans protested, we have a glimpse how eagerly anxious English eyes were watching for a turning tide. 'Hear you,' said the abbot one day, 'of the Pope's holiness and the congregation of bishops, abbots, and princes gathered to the council at Mantua? They be gathered for the reformation of the universal Church; and here now we have a book of the excuse of the Germans, by which we may know what heretics they be: for if they were Catholics and true men as they pretend to be, they would never have refused to come to a general council.'

So matters went with the abbot for some months after he had sworn obedience to the king. Lulling his conscience with such opiates as the casuists could provide for him, he watched anxiously for a change, and laboured with but little reserve to hold his brethren to their old allegiance.

In the summer of 1535, however, a change came over the scene, very different from the outward reaction for which he was looking, and a better mind woke in the abbot: he learnt that in swearing what he did not mean with reservations and nice distinctions, he had lied to heaven and lied to man; that to save his miserable life he had perilled his soul. When the oath of supremacy was required of the nation, Sir Thomas More, Bishop Fisher, and the monks of the Charterhouse--mistaken, as we believe, in judgment, but true to their consciences, and disdaining evasion or subterfuge--chose, with deliberate nobleness, rather to die than to perjure themselves. This is no place to enter on the great question of the justice or necessity of those executions; but the story of the so-called martyrdoms convulsed the Catholic world. The pope shook upon his throne; the shuttle of diplomatic intrigue stood still; diplomatists who had lived so long in lies that the whole life of man seemed but a stage pageant, a thing of show and tinsel, stood aghast at the revelation of English sincerity, and a shudder of great awe ran through Europe. The fury of party leaves little room for generous emotion, and no pity was felt for these men by the English Protestants. The Protestants knew well that if these same sufferers could have had their way, they would themselves have been sacrificed by hecatombs; and as they had never experienced mercy, so they were in turn without mercy. But to the English Catholics, who believed as Fisher believed, but who had not dared to suffer as Fisher suffered, his death and the death of the rest acted as a glimpse of the Judgment Day. Their safety became their shame and terror; and in the radiant example before them of true faithfulness, they saw their own falsehood and their own disgrace. So it was with Father Forest, who had taught his penitents in confession that they might perjure themselves, and who now sought a cruel death in voluntary expiation; so it was with Whiting, the Abbot of Glastonbury; so with others whose names should be more familiar to us than they are; and here in Woburn we are to see the feeble but genuine penitence of Abbot Hobbes. He was still unequal to immediate martyrdom, but he did what he knew might drag his death upon him if disclosed to the Government, and surrounded by spies he could have had no hope of concealment.

'At the time,' deposed Robert Salford, 'that the monks of the Charterhouse, with other traitors, did suffer death, the abbot did call us into the Chapter-house, and said these words:--"Brethren, this is a perilous time; such a scourge was never heard since Christ's passion. Ye hear how good men suffer the death. Brethren, this is undoubted for our offences. Ye read, so long as the children of Israel kept the commandments of God, so long their enemies had no power over them, but God took vengeance of their enemies. But when they broke God's commandments, then they were subdued by their enemies, and so be we. Therefore let us be sorry for our offences. Undoubted He will take vengeance of our enemies; I mean those heretics that causeth so many good men to suffer thus. Alas, it is a piteous case that so much Christian blood should be shed. Therefore, good brethren, for the reverence of God, every one of you devoutly pray, and say this Psalm, 'Oh God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled, and made Jerusalem a heap of stones. The dead bodies of thy servants have they given to be meat to the fowls of the air, and the flesh of thy saints unto the beasts of the field. Their blood have they shed like water on every side of Jerusalem, and there was no man to bury them. We are become an open scorn unto our enemies, a very scorn and derision unto them that are round about us. Oh, remember not our old sins, but have mercy upon us, and that soon, for we are come to great misery. Help us, oh God of our salvation, for the glory of thy name. Oh, be merciful unto our sins for thy name's sake. Wherefore do the heathen say, Where is now their God?' Ye shall say this Psalm," repeated the abbot, "every Friday, after the litany, prostrate, when ye lie upon the high altar, and undoubtedly God will cease this extreme scourge." And so,' continues Salford, significantly, 'the convent did say this aforesaid Psalm until there were certain that did murmur at the saying of it, and so it was left.'

The abbot, it seems, either stood alone, or found but languid support; even his own familiar friends whom he trusted, those with whom he had walked in the house of God, had turned against him; the harsh air of the dawn of a new world choked him: what was there for him but to die? But his conscience still haunted him: while he lived he must fight on, and so, if possible, find pardon for his perjury. The blows in those years fell upon the Church thick and fast. In February 1536, the Bill passed for the dissolution of the smaller monasteries; and now we find the sub-prior with the whole fraternity united in hostility, and the abbot without one friend remaining.

'He did again call us together,' says the next deposition, 'and lamentably mourning for the dissolving the said houses, he enjoined us to sing "Salvator mundi, salva nos omnes," every day after lauds; and we murmured at it, and were not content to sing it for such cause; and so we did omit it divers days, for which the abbot came unto the chapter, and did in manner rebuke us, and said we were bound to obey his commandment by our profession, and so did command us to sing it again with the versicle "Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered. Let them also that hate him flee before him." Also he enjoined us at every mass that every priest did sing, to say the collect, "Oh God, who despisest not the sighing of a contrite heart." And he said if we did this with good and true devotion, God would so handle the matter, that it should be to the comfort of all England, and so show us mercy as he showed unto the children of Israel. And surely, brethren, there will come to us a good man that will rectify these monasteries again that be now supprest, because "God can of these stones raise up children to Abraham."'

'Of the stones,' perhaps, but less easily of the stony-hearted monks, who, with pitiless smiles, watched the abbot's sorrow, which should soon bring him to his ruin.

Time passed on, and as the world grew worse, so the abbot grew more lonely. Desolate and unsupported, he was still unable to make up his mind to the course which he knew to be right; but he slowly strengthened himself for the trial, and as Lent came on, the season brought with it a more special call to effort; he did not fail to recognise it. The conduct of the fraternity sorely disturbed him. They preached against all which he most loved and valued, in language purposely coarse; and the mild sweetness of the rebukes which he administered, showed plainly on which side lay, in the abbey of Woburn, the larger portion of the spirit of Heaven. Now, when the passions of those times have died away, and we can look back with more indifferent eyes, how touching is the following scene. There was one Sir William, curate of Woburn Chapel, whose tongue, it seems, was rough beyond the rest. The abbot met him one day, and spoke to him. 'Sir William,' he said, 'I hear tell ye be a great railer. I marvel that ye rail so. I pray you teach my cure the Scripture of God, and that may be to edification. I pray you leave such railing. Ye call the pope a bear and a bandog. Either he is a good man or an ill. _Domino suo stat aut cadit._ The office of a bishop is honourable. What edifying is this to rail? Let him alone.'

But they would not let him alone, nor would they let the abbot alone. He grew 'somewhat acrased,' they said; vexed with feelings of which they had no experience. He fell sick, sorrow and the Lent discipline weighing upon him. The brethren went to see him in his room; one Brother Dan Woburn came among the rest, and asked him how he did; the abbot answered, 'I would that I had died with the good men that died for holding with the pope. My conscience, my conscience doth grudge me every day for it.' Life was fast losing its value for him. What was life to him or any man when bought with a sin against his soul? 'If the abbot be disposed to die, for that matter,' Brother Croxton observed, 'he may die as soon as he will.'

All Lent he fasted and prayed, and his illness grew upon him; and at length in Passion week he thought all was over, and that he was going away. On Passion Sunday he called the brethren about him, and as they stood round his bed, with their cold, hard eyes, 'he exhorted them all to charity;' he implored them 'never to consent to go out of their monastery; and if it chanced them to be put from it, they should in no wise forsake their habit.' After these words, 'being in a great agony, he rose out of his bed, and cried out and said, "I would to God, it would please him to take me out of this wretched world; and I would I had died with the good men that have suffered death heretofore, for they were quickly out of their pain."'[T] Then, half wandering, he began to mutter to himself aloud the thoughts which had been working in him in his struggles; and quoting St. Bernard's words about the pope, he exclaimed, 'Tu quis es primatu Abel, gubernatione Noah, auctoritate Moses, judicatu Samuel, potestate Petrus, unctione Christus. Aliæ ecclesiæ habent super se pastores. Tu pastor pastorum es.'

Let it be remembered that this is no sentimental fiction begotten out of the brain of some ingenious novelist, but the record of the true words and sufferings of a genuine child of Adam, labouring in a trial too hard for him.

He prayed to die, and in good time death was to come to him; but not, after all, in the sick bed, with his expiation but half completed. A year before, he had thrown down the cross when it was offered him. He was to take it again--the very cross which he had refused. He recovered. He was brought before the council; with what result, there are no means of knowing. To admit the papal supremacy when officially questioned was high treason. Whether the abbot was constant, and received some conditional pardon, or whether his heart again for the moment failed him--whichever he did, the records are silent. This only we ascertain of him: that he was not put to death under the statute of supremacy. But, two years later, when the official list was presented to the Parliament of those who had suffered for their share in 'the Pilgrimage of Grace,' among the rest we find the name of Robert Hobbes, late Abbot of Woburn. To this solitary fact we can add nothing. The rebellion was put down, and in the punishment of the offenders there was unusual leniency; not more than thirty persons were executed, although forty thousand had been in arms. Those only were selected who had been most signally implicated. But they were all leaders in the movement; the men of highest rank, and therefore greatest guilt. They died for what they believed their duty; and the king and council did their duty in enforcing the laws against armed insurgents. He for whose cause each supposed themselves to be contending, has long since judged between them; and both parties perhaps now see all things with clearer eyes than was permitted to them on earth.

We also can see more distinctly. We will not refuse the Abbot Hobbes a brief record of his trial and passion. And although twelve generations of Russells--all loyal to the Protestant ascendancy--have swept Woburn clear of Catholic associations, they, too, in these later days, will not regret to see revived the authentic story of its last abbot.

FOOTNOTES:

[Q] From _Fraser's Magazine_, 1857.

[R] Rolls House MS., _Miscellaneous Papers_, First Series. 356.

[S] Tanner MS. 105, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

[T] Meaning, as he afterwards said, More and Fisher and the Carthusians.

ENGLAND'S FORGOTTEN WORTHIES.[U]

1. _The Observations of Sir Richard Hawkins, Knt., in his Voyage in the South Sea in 1593._ Reprinted from the Edition of 1622, and Edited by R. H. Major, Esq., of the British Museum. Published by the Hakluyt Society.

2. _The Discoverie of the Empire of Guiana._ By Sir Walter Ralegh, Knt. Edited, with copious Explanatory Notes, and a Biographical Memoir, by Sir Robert H. Schomburgk, Phil. D., &c.

3. _Narratives of Early Voyages undertaken for the Discovery of a Passage to Cathaia and India by the North-west_; with Selections from the Records of the Worshipful Fellowship of the Merchants of London, trading into the East Indies, and from MSS. in the Library of the British Museum, now first published, by Thomas Rundall, Esq.

The Reformation, the Antipodes, the American Continent, the Planetary system, and the infinite deep of the Heavens, have now become common and familiar facts to us. Globes and orreries are the playthings of our school-days; we inhale the spirit of Protestantism with our earliest breath of consciousness. It is all but impossible to throw back our imagination into the time when, as new grand discoveries, they stirred every mind which they touched with awe and wonder at the revelation which God had sent down among mankind. Vast spiritual and material continents lay for the first time displayed, opening fields of thought and fields of enterprise of which none could conjecture the limit. Old routine was broken up. Men were thrown back on their own strength and their own power, unshackled, to accomplish whatever they might dare. And although we do not speak of these discoveries as the cause of that enormous force of heart and intellect which accompanied them (for they were as much the effect as the cause, and one reacted on the other), yet at any rate they afforded scope and room for the play of powers which, without such scope, let them have been as transcendant as they would, must have passed away unproductive and blighted.

An earnest faith in the supernatural, an intensely real conviction of the divine and devilish forces by which the universe was guided and misguided, was the inheritance of the Elizabethan age from Catholic Christianity. The fiercest and most lawless men did then really and truly believe in the actual personal presence of God or the devil in every accident, or scene, or action. They brought to the contemplation of the new heaven and the new earth an imagination saturated with the spiritual convictions of the old era, which were not lost, but only infinitely expanded. The planets, whose vastness they now learnt to recognise, were, therefore, only the more powerful for evil or for good; the tides were the breathing of Demogorgon; and the idolatrous American tribes were real worshippers of the real devil, and were assisted with the full power of his evil army.

It is a form of thought which, however in a vague and general way we may continue to use its phraseology, has become, in its detailed application to life, utterly strange to us. We congratulate ourselves on the enlargement of our understanding when we read the decisions of grave law courts in cases of supposed witchcraft; we smile complacently over Raleigh's story of the island of the Amazons, and rejoice that we are not such as he--entangled in the cobwebs of effete and foolish superstition. Yet the true conclusion is less flattering to our vanity. That Raleigh and Bacon could believe what they believed, and could be what they were notwithstanding, is to us a proof that the injury which such mistakes can inflict is unspeakably insignificant: and arising, as they arose, from a never-failing sense of the real awfulness and mystery of the world, and of the life of human souls upon it, they witness to the presence in such minds of a spirit, the loss of which not the most perfect acquaintance with every law by which the whole creation moves can compensate. We wonder at the grandeur, the moral majesty of some of Shakespeare's characters, so far beyond what the noblest among ourselves can imitate, and at first thought we attribute it to the genius of the poet, who has outstripped nature in his creations. But we are misunderstanding the power and the meaning of poetry in attributing creativeness to it in any such sense. Shakespeare created, but only as the spirit of nature created around him, working in him as it worked abroad in those among whom he lived. The men whom he draws were such men as he saw and knew; the words they utter were such as he heard in the ordinary conversations in which he joined. At the Mermaid with Raleigh and with Sidney, and at a thousand unnamed English firesides, he found the living originals for his Prince Hals, his Orlandos, his Antonios, his Portias, his Isabellas. The closer personal acquaintance which we can form with the English of the age of Elizabeth, the more we are satisfied that Shakespeare's great poetry is no more than the rhythmic echo of the life which it depicts.

It was, therefore, with no little interest that we heard of the formation of a society which was to employ itself, as we understood, in republishing in accessible form some, if not all, of the invaluable records compiled or composed by Richard Hakluyt. Books, like everything else, have their appointed death-day; the souls of them, unless they be found worthy of a second birth in a new body, perish with the paper in which they lived; and the early folio Hakluyts, not from their own want of merit, but from our neglect of them, were expiring of old age. The five-volume quarto edition, published in 1811, so little people then cared for the exploits of their ancestors, consisted but of 270 copies. It was intended for no more than for curious antiquaries, or for the great libraries, where it could be consulted as a book of reference; and among a people, the greater part of whom had never heard Hakluyt's name, the editors are scarcely to be blamed if it never so much as occurred to them that general readers would care to have the book within their reach.

And yet those five volumes may be called the Prose Epic of the modern English nation. They contain the heroic tales of the exploits of the great men in whom the new era was inaugurated; not mythic, like the Iliads and the Eddas, but plain broad narratives of substantial facts, which rival legend in interest and grandeur. What the old epics were to the royally or nobly born, this modern epic is to the common people. We have no longer kings or princes for chief actors, to whom the heroism like the dominion of the world had in time past been confined. But, as it was in the days of the Apostles, when a few poor fishermen from an obscure lake in Palestine assumed, under the Divine mission, the spiritual authority over mankind, so, in the days of our own Elizabeth, the seamen from the banks of the Thames and the Avon, the Plym and the Dart, self-taught and self-directed, with no impulse but what was beating in their own royal hearts, went out across the unknown seas fighting, discovering, colonising, and graved out the channels, paving them at last with their bones, through which the commerce and enterprise of England has flowed out over all the world. We can conceive nothing, not the songs of Homer himself, which would be read among us with more enthusiastic interest than these plain massive tales; and a people's edition of them in these days, when the writings of Ainsworth and Eugène Sue circulate in tens of thousands, would perhaps be the most blessed antidote which could be bestowed upon us. The heroes themselves were the men of the people--the Joneses, the Smiths, the Davises, the Drakes; and no courtly pen, with the one exception of Raleigh, lent its polish or its varnish to set them off. In most cases the captain himself, or his clerk or servant, or some unknown gentleman volunteer, sat down and chronicled the voyage which he had shared; and thus inorganically arose a collection of writings which, with all their simplicity, are for nothing more striking than for the high moral beauty, warmed with natural feeling, which displays itself through all their pages. With us, the sailor is scarcely himself beyond his quarter-deck. If he is distinguished in his profession, he is professional merely; or if he is more than that, he owes it not to his work as a sailor, but to independent domestic culture. With them, their profession was the school of their nature, a high moral education which most brought out what was most nobly human in them; and the wonders of earth, and air, and sea, and sky, were a real intelligible language in which they heard Almighty God speaking to them.

That such hopes of what might be accomplished by the Hakluyt Society should in some measure be disappointed, is only what might naturally be anticipated of all very sanguine expectation. Cheap editions are expensive editions to the publisher; and historical societies, from a necessity which appears to encumber all corporate English action, rarely fail to do their work expensively and infelicitously. Yet, after all allowances and deductions, we cannot reconcile ourselves to the mortification of having found but one volume in the series to be even tolerably edited, and that one to be edited by a gentleman to whom England is but an adopted country--Sir Robert Schomburgk. Raleigh's 'Conquest of Guiana,' with Sir Robert's sketch of Raleigh's history and character, form in everything but its cost a very model of an excellent volume. For the remaining editors,[V] we are obliged to say that they have exerted themselves successfully to paralyse whatever interest was reviving in Hakluyt, and to consign their own volumes to the same obscurity to which time and accident were consigning the earlier editions. Very little which was really noteworthy escaped the industry of Hakluyt himself, and we looked to find reprints of the most remarkable of the stories which were to be found in his collection. The editors began unfortunately with proposing to continue the work where he had left it, and to produce narratives hitherto unpublished of other voyages of inferior interest, or not of English origin. Better thoughts appear to have occurred to them in the course of the work; but their evil destiny overtook them before their thoughts could get themselves executed. We opened one volume with eagerness, bearing the title of 'Voyages to the North-west,' in hope of finding our old friends Davis and Frobisher. We found a vast unnecessary Editor's Preface: and instead of the voyages themselves, which with their picturesqueness and moral beauty shine among the fairest jewels in the diamond mine of Hakluyt, we encountered an analysis and digest of their results, which Milton was called in to justify in an inappropriate quotation. It is much as if they had undertaken to edit 'Bacon's Essays,' and had retailed what they conceived to be the substance of them in their own language; strangely failing to see that the real value of the actions or the thoughts of remarkable men does not lie in the material result which can be gathered from them, but in the heart and soul of the actors or speakers themselves. Consider what Homer's 'Odyssey' would be, reduced into an analysis.

The editor of the 'Letters of Columbus' apologises for the rudeness of the old seaman's phraseology. Columbus, he tells us, was not so great a master of the pen as of the art of navigation. We are to make excuses for him. We are put on our guard, and warned not to be offended, before we are introduced to the sublime record of sufferings under which a man of the highest order was staggering towards the end of his earthly calamities; although the inarticulate fragments in which his thought breaks out from him, are strokes of natural art by the side of which literary pathos is poor and meaningless.

And even in the subjects which they select they are pursued by the same curious fatality. Why is Drake to be best known, or to be only known, in his last voyage? Why pass over the success, and endeavour to immortalise the failure? When Drake climbed the tree in Panama, and saw both oceans, and vowed that he would sail a ship in the Pacific; when he crawled out upon the cliffs of Terra del Fuego, and leaned his head over the southernmost angle of the world; when he scored a furrow round the globe with his keel, and received the homage of the barbarians of the antipodes in the name of the Virgin Queen, he was another man from what he had become after twenty years of court life and intrigue, and Spanish fighting and gold-hunting. There is a tragic solemnity in his end, if we take it as the last act of his career; but it is his life, not his death, which we desire--not what he failed to do, but what he did.

But every bad has a worse below it, and more offensive than all these is the editor of Hawkins's 'Voyage to the South Sea.' The narrative is striking in itself; not one of the best, but very good; and, as it is republished complete, we can fortunately read it through, carefully shutting off Captain Bethune's notes with one hand, and we shall then find in it the same beauty which breathes in the tone of all the writings of the period.

It is a record of misfortune, but of misfortune which did no dishonour to him who sunk under it; and there is a melancholy dignity in the style in which Hawkins tells his story, which seems to say, that though he had been defeated, and had never again an opportunity of winning back his lost laurels, he respects himself still for the heart with which he endured a shame which would have broken a smaller man. It would have required no large exertion of editorial self-denial to have abstained from marring the pages with puns of which 'Punch' would be ashamed, and with the vulgar affectation of patronage with which the sea captain of the nineteenth century condescends to criticise and approve of his half-barbarous precursor. And what excuse can we find for such an offence as this which follows. The war of freedom of the Araucan Indians is the most gallant episode in the history of the New World. The Spaniards themselves were not behindhand in acknowledging the chivalry before which they quailed, and, after many years of ineffectual efforts, they gave up a conflict which they never afterwards resumed; leaving the Araucans alone, of all the American races with which they came in contact, a liberty which they were unable to tear from them. It is a subject for an epic poem; and whatever admiration is due to the heroism of a brave people whom no inequality of strength could appal and no defeats could crush, these poor Indians have a right to demand of us. The story of the war was well known in Europe; Hawkins, in coasting the western shores of South America, fell in with them, and the finest passage in his book is the relation of one of the incidents of the war:--

An Indian captain was taken prisoner by the Spaniards, and for that
he was of name, and known to have done his devoir against them, they
cut off his hands, thereby intending to disenable him to fight any
more against them. But he, returning home, desirous to revenge this
injury, to maintain his liberty, with the reputation of his nation,
and to help to banish the Spaniard, with his tongue intreated and
incited them to persevere in their accustomed valour and reputation,
abasing the enemy and advancing his nation; condemning their
contraries of cowardliness, and confirming it by the cruelty used
with him and other his companions in their mishaps; showing them his
arms without hands, and naming his brethren whose half feet they had
cut off, because they might be unable to sit on horseback; with
force arguing that if they feared them not, they would not have used
so great inhumanity--for fear produceth cruelty, the companion of
cowardice. Thus encouraged he them to fight for their lives, limbs,
and liberty, choosing rather to die an honourable death fighting,
than to live in servitude as fruitless members of the commonwealth.
Thus using the office of a sergeant-major, and having loaden his two
stumps with bundles of arrows, he succoured them who, in the
succeeding battle had their store wasted; and changing himself from
place to place, animated and encouraged his countrymen with such
comfortable persuasions, as it is reported and credibly believed,
that he did more good with his words and presence, without striking
a stroke, than a great part of the army did with fighting to the
utmost.

It is an action which may take its place by the side of the myth of Mucius Scævola, or the real exploit of that brother of the poet Æschylus, who, when the Persians were flying from Marathon, clung to a ship till both his hands were hewn away, and then seized it with his teeth, leaving his name as a portent even in the splendid calendar of Athenian heroes. Captain Bethune, without call or need, making his notes, merely, as he tells us, from the suggestions of his own mind as he revised the proof-sheets, informs us, at the bottom of the page, that 'it reminds him of the familiar lines--

For Widdrington I needs must wail,
As one in doleful dumps;
For when his legs were smitten off,
He fought upon his stumps.'

It must not avail him, that he has but quoted from the ballad of Chevy Chase. It is the most deformed stanza[W] of the modern deformed version which was composed in the eclipse of heart and taste, on the restoration of the Stuarts; and if such verses could then pass for serious poetry, they have ceased to sound in any ear as other than a burlesque; the associations which they arouse are only absurd, and they could only have continued to ring in his memory through their ludicrous doggrel.

When to these offences of the Society we add, that in the long laboured appendices and introductions, which fill up valuable space, which increase the expense of the edition, and into reading which many readers are, no doubt, betrayed, we have found nothing which assists the understanding of the stories which they are supposed to illustrate--when we have declared that we have found what is most uncommon passed without notice, and what is most trite and familiar encumbered with comment--we have unpacked our hearts of the bitterness which these volumes have aroused in us, and can now take our leave of them and go on with our more grateful subject.